Asahina Aki 朝比奈秋. Sanshōuo no shijūkunichi サンショウウオの四十九日. Shinchōsha, 2024.
Asahina shared the 171st Akutagawa Prize, for the first half of 2024, with Matsunaga K. Sanzō. Born 1981, debuted 2021. Asahina is a doctor; not just a writer who went to medical school, but a practicing physician. That seems to inform all of his fiction; it certainly does this novel.
The title can be translated as The Salamanders’ 49th Day, but that won’t mean anything unless you know the story setup. Which itself takes some explaining. 
The protagonists and alternating co-narrators, two young women named An and Shun, are a pair of conjoined twins. But unlike (as far as I can tell) other documented examples of conjoined twins, they’re conjoined at, as they explain, every point, with the result being that from an external view one wouldn’t guess that they’re two people rather than one. They explain it as being split essentially right down the middle, with An controlling one side of the body and Shun the other, although they add that internally things are a little more complicated, with some shared organs and some duplicate, and consciousnesses that are distinct yet permeable to each other. They fall asleep separately, and the waking one is aware of the what the sleeper is dreaming, for example. And while they explain their division in terms of right-left, in practice they speak of one or the other of them moving their shared body; it appears either can exert control at will.
Their unusual situation yields the first half of the title. On a school field trip to a museum as elementary school students, they’re shown a picture of the yin-yang symbol, and the curator notes that it’s sometimes called the “yin-yang fish.” The girls think it looks more like salamanders than fish, and in the same breath they realize that they identify with the the diagram: a whole split into interlocking halves, with a bit of each half occurring in the midst of its counterpart. The reader is left to wonder if the salamander’s regenerative capacities are also meant to be part of the comparison; given the narrative’s interest in death and what might survive it, perhaps so.
The second half of the title is supplied by the event around which the narrative centers, their uncle’s death. Their uncle and their father share a biological anomaly as rare as An’s and Shun’s. They were born as a fetus in fetu: their father’s body was entirely contained within their uncles. But unlike (as far as I can tell) other documented examples of fetus in fetu, both survive. Their father was discovered and delivered when their uncle was almost a year old, and both lived well into middle age. The girls’ father is still alive at the end of the book, while the uncle dies early on. Much of the action of the story concerns the funeral and then the forty-ninth day after death, when the family gathers again to inter the uncle’s cremated remains in the family tomb. The latter gathering in particular occasions a lot of self-reflection on An and Shun’s part.
The story is narrated in the first person by An and Shun alternately. The shift from one to another usually comes at breaks in the story, but occasionally happens mid-paragraph. Despite their consciousnesses being distinct and their personalities somewhat contrasting, their narrative voices didn’t strike me (at least) as different, meaning it’s easy to lose track of who’s speaking. Shun uses the first-person pronoun watashi and writes it in kana (わたし); An writes her pronoun in kanji (漢字), and crucially we’re left to decide whether to voice it watashi or watakushi. If the similarity in their narratorial voices is intentional on the author’s part, then it fits nicely into one of the themes of the novel, which is the way their identities and experiences, though distinct, bleed into one another.
The novel attempts to connect the sisters’ experiences to a larger exploration of human consciousness. The narration insists that consciousness is not tied to any one organ but to the organism as a whole, which introduces a note of transcendence that might be surprising in a novel by a doctor. It’s also poignant, especially at the end when their uncle’s death forces them both to reflect on their own mortality. An’s reaction comes in the form of a dream where she sees their own funeral decades later, with their own grown children interring their bones; since An and Shun have been told that they’re unable to bear children, this reads as a heartbreaking longing for a conventionally-imagined form of immortality. Shun, meanwhile, has what might be described as a near-death experience; she wakes up to find her sister reading, and herself unable to feel the bodily sensations she’s used to. She soon decides she must be dead, but with her consciousness seemingly continuing, as a result of her body (now belonging only to her sister) still living. She has to contemplate the idea of living on for decades within her sister; a state that mirrors not only her father and uncle’s birth, but her own, since she didn’t emerge/get discovered (as she puts it) as a distinct consciousness until she and An were five, and even then Shun was self-aware for some time before An was aware of her.
In many ways, it’s a haunting novel. But I have to own that I felt uncomfortable reading it, because it appears to be a product of the author’s imagination. As A-Prize committee member Shimada Masahiko put it, it kind of reads like a Black Jack-style medical fantasy. Asahina (like Tezuka, actually) has the medical training to make it plausible, but it remains an imagined situation. Current Anglophone discourse on identity and fiction has trained me to be suspicious of authors appropriating an identity not their own, however good their intentions, and this feels like a case of that. And particularly coming so soon after Ichikawa Saou’s win, it feels like a strange thing for the Prize to conscion. On the other hand I’ll also admit to loving Black Jack…